Get with the plot

COMMENTING on the new television news channel, a friend referred to the management’s decision to broadcast in what is effectively a foreign language to the great majority of the country’s population as “a great gamble, something of a bet.”

The bet is that within a couple of years, a major event will occur to pull Pakistan into the global media spotlight — or more than it is already, he added. It need not happen on our soil but Pakistan will be involved and then, he mused, local English-language channels will become a significant source for analysts and commentators. Furthermore, global audiences will have the option of news coverage and analysis from a local perspective.

“Imagine the situation if such channels had been around in the aftermath of 9/11,” he said. “A credible English-language Pakistani channel would have been at the centre of the world’s attention.”

Certainly, Pakistan is never off the world’s headline news for long. Yet a CNN foreign correspondent confided in 2002 that many news networks across the United States – and he guessed that the same was true for parts of Europe as well – were “completely unprepared” to cover Pakistan’s politics to the depth required in the aftermath of the New York attacks. “We suddenly had a massive audience clamouring for news about a part of the world they – and frankly, a number of journalists as well – knew hardly anything about,” he commented. “We knew the basic facts but had no real understanding.”

By now, many large news organisations have their own correspondents and staffers stationed in Pakistan. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to believe that a local channel broadcasting in English will have the potential to play a significant role, not least in the context of putting Pakistan’s and Pakistanis’ views on the international record.

Such new channels may also play a part in elevating the standard of debate in the country. Constructing their look and feel along the lines of the world’s most credible news networks, they are likely to accommodate highly educated and savvy individuals with the capacity to identify the links between Pakistan’s myriad realities, political and otherwise.

There is nothing to stop such skilled analysts from joining the Urdu-language news channels — except the editorial management. The established channels appear to have decided to keep the debate at the level of the lowest common denominator, perhaps because of perceived audience interests. In doing so, however, the media moguls underestimate Pakistan’s citizenry. This country’s millions are highly politically aware and far more people are educated and well-read in Urdu than in English. However, the older channels choose explosive, sensationalist reporting over insightful analysis. They represent responsive, rather than responsible, journalism.

On the downside, the English-language channels will also play a role in reinforcing the language apartheid already in place. Decades of poor policies, educational and economic, have split Pakistan along linguistic lines where mainly the well-to-do are fluent in English and the majority of the people are not.

The great thing about having only Urdu-language channels was that in order to get the news as it unfolded, the English speakers had to extend themselves. Of course everybody speaks Urdu, yet many a yuppie sat squinting at the news ticker at the bottom of the screen, unable to read it without moving his lips. Everyone was getting the same news, regardless of language preference.

It was good while it lasted.

Postscript: An educated young person at a news channel was asked to scan television programming and record clips of a cleric who is always in the news. Some time later, the employee came back with the required shots. Unfortunately, they proved to be from the satirical Four Man Show.

hmumtaz@dawn.com

Remembering Dr Feroz Ahmed

REMEMBERING Dr Feroz Ahmed (August 4, 1940-April 4, 1997) is as relevant today on his 68th birth anniversary, as it was on April 4, 1997, when he died of heart failure in Washington DC. At the time of his death he was professor of social work at Howard University.

In a country like Pakistan where history moves slowly, dreams and objectives of a revolutionary like Feroz Ahmed for equitable society hardly see the light of day, though he never faltered from his mission.

His mindset was a product of 1960s revolutionary upsurge when students of Pakistan were awakening to meet the challenges of military dictatorship of Ayub Khan. In Karachi Hussain Naqi, Meraj Mohammad Khan, Dr Feroz Ahmed and Fatehyab Ali Khan were defying the system for establishing a new social and democratic order in Pakistan.

Dr Ahmed is the author of 20 books and monographs. He has over 30 scientific papers published in peer review journals and nearly 300 articles carried by daily newspapers, including Dawn to his account. He was the founding editor of the Urdu magazine Pakistan Forum published from Karachi in early 1970s. In addition, he was a regular contributor to Africasia (Paris) and weekly Viewpoint (Lahore). Dr Ahmed wrote on a broad range of subjects including sociology, political economy, politics, demography and epidemiology.

Though he studied Marine Zoology, Public Health and received his doctorate in Demography from the John Hopkins University School of Public Health and did his post-doctoral research at Harvard University’s Center for Population Studies, streak of history pushed him towards situations which finally moulded him into a social scientist and political activist. In that role, he was source of inspiration for those who continuously struggled for the creation of equitable society, exposing all types of external and internal exploitation.

Dr Ahmed taught Demography at Ontario University, Canada, and at the School of Social Work, Howard University, Washington DC, and lectured worldwide.

In early ’70s, he gave a new vision to the youth of Pakistan to look at neo-colonialism dialectically and more methodically.

He introduced new methods of research by attracting the young generation of Pakistan to the writings of progressive social scientists.

Most of the left writers, before that, were quasi socialist and their writings were mostly without any substance. The credit goes to the Pakistan Forum, jointly edited by three Ahmeds — Feroz Ahmed, Dr Eqbal Ahmed and Aijaz Ahmed — and published from Canada, for introducing the Monthly Review, NACALA Report, MERIP Report and other left oriented journals. Budding writers learned from him standards of clarity, rigour and intellectual persistence.

Feroz Ahmed was a friend of people of Pakistan. He felt always comfortable among the peasants of Hasht Nagar and workers of Ravi Rayan who were waging a relentless struggle against feudal and bureaucratic exploitation.

Like any other social scientist, who had some vision, he was disappointed by the role of PPP. In one of his articles, Structure and Contradiction in Pakistan, he wrote: “Fear — real and imaginary — of India and the aim of liberating Kashmir have been the main rationalisation for the growth of the Pakistani military.

Among the civilian leaders, none had advocated the military case more intelligently than PPP chief Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.” And he quoted from ZAB’s book, Myth of Independence: “Pakistan’s security and territorial integrity are more important than economic development.”

Dr Ahmed was also fully conscious of the fact that Pakistan cannot become independent, united and prosperous without eliminating the causes of dependence, disunity and impoverishment. He said: “in order to eradicate the roots of these evils, it will be necessary to destroy the social groups which perpetuate and profit from them. Such an undertaking is certainly not on the agenda of Pakistan’s present rulers.”

How true he was, it seems, as if he is uttering these words today. We have not been able to extricate ourselves from evils of past, which his eyes and mind observed during that period. As you know he was fighting for the political awakening and for a secular democratic society heading towards socialism, I am sorry to say that some of his dreams will never come true. Perhaps this is the verdict of history: certain opportunities once lost are never gained!